A Case Study On The Construction And The Influencing Factors Of The PCK Of An EFL Experienced Teacher In A High School

Education is the cornerstone of national prosperity and progress,and teachers have an extremely important position in the education development.Shulman put forward the concept of pedagogical content knowledge(PCK)in the 1980 s to emphasize the professional quality of teachers,which distinguishes the teachers from other professionals.This kind of knowledge integrates the subject matter knowledge and general pedagogical knowledge to help teachers transform their own knowledge to the form that is accessible to students.Although studies on PCK have been carried out early,few studies have been conducted on English as foreign language teachers' PCK.The present study focuses on PCK of an experienced English teacher in Senior High school during his eight years of teaching.The research analyzes the construction and the development of this teacher's PCK,and investigates the factors that affect the construction of his PCK.There are two main research questions in this study: 1)What kinds of PCK does this experienced teacher construct and develop? 2)What factors influence the construction of the teacher's PCK? The specialty of this participant lies in his characteristics: 1)this teacher is one key member of the outstanding young teachers in his school and has won many prizes in teaching competitions;2)this teacher had become an excellent teacher during his fifth year of teaching and grew faster than other teachers.Therefore,through an in-depth study aiming at understand the development and influencing factors of the construction of this teacher's PCK,the author can better provide suggestions to pre-service teachers,novice teachers,and teacher educators.This qualitative research adopted case study method.The multi-sourced data ranged from classroom observations,semi-structured interviews,structured interviews,documents such as teacher's reflection journals,and other relevant materials.Data collection and analysis were performed synchronously,and the data were comprehensively analyzed later.The results of the study show that: 1)The teacher's PCK can be sorted into four components,namely,knowledge of curriculum,subject matter knowledge,knowledge of students,and knowledge of pedagogy.And it can be indicated that the teacher' PCK begins to form in his educational practice and continuously develops during his teaching period.Nowadays,various elements of the teacher's PCK have been integrated and his PCK is becoming mature,which approves the idea that the PCK of the teacher is not static in nature.2)The major factors that affect the construction of this teacher's PCK can be classified into two categories: internal factors and external factors.Internal factors include the personal learning experience,accumulation of teaching experience,awareness of self-improvement and self-reflection.Among them,his constant and effective self-reflection is the major factor.External factors include influence from peer teachers,in-service training and so on.Finally,based on the discussion of the results,the study attempts to propose some implications to English teaching,teachers themselves as well as the teacher education programs.